


Impasse

by EllieCarina



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi - Fandom
Genre: F/M, Force Bond, I LOVE ALL OF THIS, Movie Continuation, Spoilers, Stay away if you don't want spoilers, TLJ Spoilers, Unbeta'd, a brief one so far, i've never been so happy, might expand on it, missing scene at the end, my extra shipper scene, this is a spoiler fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-14
Updated: 2017-12-14
Packaged: 2019-02-14 16:12:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13011420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EllieCarina/pseuds/EllieCarina
Summary: SPOILER-FIC!!!How The Last Jedi would've ended if I got my hands on it. Extra scene with reylo-goggles on.





	Impasse

**Author's Note:**

> As always, unbeta'd, written in the dead of night.  
> I love this movie so much, I can't even function.  
> COMMENT AND FREAK OUT WITH ME GUYS!!
> 
> ...Time to re-read all the force bond fics!!

He’s kneeling before her, eyes searching, speaking a million words she can’t quite decipher but understands all the same. She isn’t surprised that he doesn’t look angry, doesn’t scream or rush up to go after her, just like she wasn’t surprised that he killed Snoke, his master, his Supreme Leader instead of her. It were those same eyes that gave him away then, the ones that give him away now. She hears his words echoing in the back of his head, spoken defiantly to Luke in a poor, spiteful attempt of psychological warfare: “I will destroy her.”

Oh Luke. He hadn’t believed him either. And then he’d let go. Luke Skywalker had done his part, fought his fight and left Rey to fend for the last few souls of the Resistance. And left her with Kylo Ren. Ben Solo. He is her job now. To turn or to end, whichever comes about sooner. Now Kylo Ren looks up at her, kneeling right were his mother and uncle sat just moments before and Rey sees Ben, the fight gone out of him, the thin veil of Kylo stripped away in an instant. It never really held up, now that she thinks of it. From the moment he had removed his mask in that wretched interrogation chamber on Starkiller Base, he’d laid himself bare for her without even knowing it. And there he sits. Unmoving, just looking. She looks back at him and her heart breaks.

She saw it so clearly when their hands touched, saw him turn, turn to her. It was solid, real. She knows it. This future isn’t lost. It seems that way, yes, and when they ripped Luke’s lightsaber apart in their fight for control, she’d had quite entirely declared it lost herself.

Until now. Until now that he looks at her like that. It’s regret mixed with grief mixed with hope, inexplicable but visible, palpable. A shameful part of her is acutely aware of where that hope comes from, knows that he knows just how tempted she was. How when she first lifted her hand to him, she had done so out of pure instinct, to take it, to belong.

But she belongs where she is now. On the Falcon, ushering her people to safety. So she does. She closes the door between them, her regret and resolve meeting his resigned loneliness. She can’t see him then but she still feels him. All the way to the Outer Rim where what’s left of the Resistance finds a temporary hiding place on a backwater planet covered in thick turquoise vines. She feels him when she is introduced to Poe, who everyone hails as the best pilot in the resistance and feels him when she sees Finn bow over a young, unconscious woman and look at her like she’s the brightest moon in a sky full of stars. When Leia sits down beside her, he’s so present that she can see his sadness in the lines of her face.

“We have everything we need right here,” Leia says after Rey asks her how they can build the Resistance back up from the shambles they’re in.

Rey wants nothing more than to believe that and clutches the two halves of the lightsaber Ben and her broke. Leia looks at her hands for a moment and makes a move to touch the pieces but finally refrains.

“He asked me to join him,” Rey tells her because somehow it seems that she must. “I wouldn’t.”

Leia glances off and then her lips go thin and she takes a deep breath, as if to brace herself. “Before he went to face my son, Luke said Ben wasn’t gone, that no one is ever truly lost,” she finally says, turning back to Rey with an unspoken question passing over her features.

Rey weighs her words carefully and Kylo’s fear and pain spreads in her chest like a wildfire: “He’s not lost. I can feel it. I saw it.”

“He’s not your responsibility,” Leia says.

“Yes, he is,” Rey says quietly. “Snoke said…and I think I knew it all along, that I was born to be a balance to him. He rose to darkness and then the light awakened in me, so I could meet him.” And then she almost laughs, because a lifetime ago, Kylo Ren had said to her in a snowy forest the very words that cross her lips next, now truer than ever: “There’s only us now.”

Leia takes her hand and holds it. And doesn’t let go until they reach safety. Deep inside her, Rey can feel Ben strain not to lean into that touch.

On the planet with the turquoise vines, so thick and massive an ancient, long extinct people had built their dwellings into, what is left of the Resistance regroups. What little they have saved from their hasty escape from Crait, they set up in one of the larger halls they find carved into the roots and tend to the wounded. Rey sits for a long time with Finn and Poe next to the woman Finn won’t let out of her sight. Her name is Rose, Rey learns, and she is a hero. One by one, people sort themselves into smaller cavities, finding room for themselves and fall asleep from exhaustion. Rey doesn’t want to be alone but she hears that roaring in her head that she has come to know within the last few days on Ach-To, the one that tells her soon she will be seeing a man standing before her who no one else can see. So she excuses herself and barely makes it into a little chamber down the larger hall, one that is far enough for nobody to hear her supposedly talk to herself.

“Get out of my head,” she orders as soon as he materialises in front of her but she knows it’s no use. Ben can control this as little as she can.

“I will find you,” he says and she looks up at him. He’s trying hard to mask his emotions but his lips quiver and his eyes dance. He is angry, defiant but he’s also hurting.

“And destroy me?” She challenges, taking a step toward him.

“You chose that fate,” he declares.

“You can’t, Ben.” Another step forward. He doesn’t budge. “I’ve seen what’s in your heart. You won’t hurt me.”

“If you’re willing to bet your life on that, come and face me,” he says and glares down at her. Rey can hear how his leather gloves stretch around his tightening fist and is thrown back to that moment they shared earlier, when she had held out her hand and he took off that glove to touch her, to feel her. And because she remembers, he remembers it too. He winces.

“How long has it been?” She asks. How long since he touched another human, how long since someone had held his hand before her?

“Don’t,” he says and what is left of his anger falls in on itself and they’re right back there on Crait, right back where he knelt in front of her and didn’t stop her from leaving, right back in Luke’s hut, where they told each other they weren’t alone.

“I can’t stop,” Rey says and only now does she realize the full scope of how helpless their situation is.

Their bond persists. Even after Snoke perished who claimed to have cast it upon them and here they are at the opposite sides of light and dark and are yet closer than they’ve ever been to anybody else. There’s no way forward but they can never go back.

If only she could make him see.

Ben still looks at her. He just does that, stand there and study her and demand she say the things she would prefer to keep hidden inside but doesn’t pay that back in kind. He sits on his weaknesses, his secrets, but that’s not gonna fly with her. She breeches the distance there and reaches out for his hand. It twitches but he doesn’t pull it away. Encouraged, Rey attempts to remove his glove but finds that she can’t. Her head snaps up to him and she locks him in place with a look. He tries sternness. And falters. After a moment, he removes the glove and it falls away.

Rey seizes the moment and grabs him by the wrist. Ben remains still, simply gazing down at her, his eyes a wild, dark ocean. With only the faintest trace of hesitation, Rey lifts his arm up until his large hand lands on her face, cupping her cheek and he takes in a sharp breath.

Again there’s images, him turning to her, her standing by him. There’s a few others too: flashing and hazy, lightsabers and wounds but then also laughing and…and something else, something Rey has never done before and it’s scarier than all the rest. She pushes the images away but Ben’s hand stays.

“You have me,” she says, “so kill me, if you must.”

Ben’s lips go thin like his mothers and then he digs his fingertips ever so lightly into her skin. This time it’s Rey who gasps.

Still, the point she is trying to make is made. He won’t kill her. He will try, he will try to want to kill her, he might work himself up enough to think that he can. But he won’t.

Then, quicker than Rey can process or stop, his free hand grabs hold of one of hers and brings it up to his throat to rest there idly. Rey can feel his pulse quicken underneath her fingertips.

“Or you kill me,” he says under his breath.

And there it is. Again. Nowhere to go, neither forwards nor backwards. She won’t kill him either. She probably should, maybe that is even her whole purpose of being. But feeling the blood pump through his veins, his life there in her grasp, she knows she can’t.

“It seems we’re at an impasse,” Ben says.

Rey almost has to laugh. He’s right.

What a cruel joke.


End file.
